Brian Rudman: More at stake in Cup than rugby

Helen Clark's Labour team won the election a few weeks after the All Blacks' World Cup defeat in 1999. Photo / Kenny Rodger

Five weeks out from the 1999 general election, a wave of gloom swept over the land. The All Blacks were defeated by the French in the semifinals of the Rugby World Cup.

Worse was to follow. Two weeks later in the Millennium Stadium, Cardiff, the South Africans beat New Zealand in the wooden spoon contest for third place.

Then, horror of horrors, our blowhard Aussie neighbours trounced the French to become world champions.

But in Labour Party campaign headquarters they were quietly popping the champagne corks. With election day just three weeks away, they saw the silver lining.

While front bench rugby fanatic Trevor Mallard was dispatched to declare on behalf of the party that he was "really depressed", the campaign committee assumed - rightly, as it turned out - that the failure of the national heroes would not reflect well on the incumbent government.

And sure enough, a few weeks later it was out with Jenny Shipley's National Government and in with Helen Clark's Labour team.

A study by three Stanford University, California, academics suggests the Labour Party's gut instincts were correct - that sporting results that are totally irrelevant to government performance can influence the way fans vote in upcoming elections.

In the case of champion football teams, a win in the 10 days before election day can cause the incumbent to receive an additional 2.42 per cent of the vote in Senate and presidential elections. Even a win by a local run-of-the-mill team can increase the incumbent's vote by 1.61 per cent.

The researchers, Andrew Healy, Neil Malhotra and Cecilia Mo, analysed county-level election results from presidential, gubernatorial and Senate elections between 1964 and 2008 against local college football outcomes in the weeks before and after election day.

They also surveyed fans during last year's "March madness" round of college basketball games, slipping queries about presidential job approval ratings into the questionnaire. With the most intense basketball fans, President Obama's job performance ranking went up 5 per cent among supporters of the winning teams.

The authors' research confirms the Labour Party's hunch "that voters' personal sense of well-being - as determined by events that are unrelated to political and economic affairs - affects their evaluations of their elected representatives".

They say "voters who are in a positive mood on election day are likely to use their mood as a signal for the incumbent party's success", and also "to be more satisfied with the status quo".

Further, "the successes and failures of the local college football team before election day significantly influence the electoral prospects of the incumbent party, suggesting that voters reward and punish incumbents for changes in their well-being unrelated to government performance".

Which perhaps explains the love affair both Labour and National politicians seem to have with Rugby World Cup 2011 to be followed soon after, at a date to be announced, by a general election.

But for all its vote-pulling potential, the very randomness of the tournament's outcome makes this coveted cup something of a poisoned chalice as well for either National or Labour. Sure, the All Blacks have been doing famously over the past week or two, but would you want to gamble your job and that of your political party on their winning the 2011 Rugby World Cup?

If you were Machiavellian, you might think that Helen Clark was willing to take that gamble when, in the heady, post-election victory days of November 2005 she jetted off to Dublin to front New Zealand's bid before the International Rugby Board to host the 2011 tournament. Maybe she figured if she was still in office in 2011, then only a miracle like the All Blacks winning the world cup on home turf, and she at Eden Park to present it, was going to get her a fifth term, so why not?

Now this cup looms large over the up-coming election, too late to assist her, but its scary potential as an instrument of Helen's revenge on those who defeated her is no doubt not lost on Rugby World Cup Minister and National Party strategist Murray McCully.

Last week, the Campaign for MMP appeared before the electoral legislation subcommittee worried that world cup hoopla next year would distract the citizenry from the solemn task of deciding whether or not to replace the MMP electoral system.

"It is crucial that we have a well-informed, well-funded information campaign ... as early as we can in 2011," said spokeswoman Sandra Grey, a politics lecturer at Victoria University.

Her concern was that with an election overshadowed by the rugby tournament, people would be too distracted to analyse the finer points of the voting system.

The awful truth is, if the learned Stanford researchers are right, MMP, to say nothing of the Government, could sink or swim, not on its merits, but on whether the All Blacks have a successful tournament.